Group: Startups vital in progress

 PNG Business Council president David Toua says startup businesses are very important to Papua New Guinea’s development.

He said this at the Kumul GameChangers conference in Port Moresby yesterday.

“Experiences from all the world over demonstrate that startup entrepreneurship is increasingly important to national development,” Toua said.  

He said startup entrepreneurship usually brought benefits such as new jobs, innovation and increases competition into the business environment.  

He added that statistic showed that startup businesses were responsible for the majority of new job creation in many countries.  

“The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research data shows that an entrepreneur with high potential creates on average as much as 3 times more jobs than an entrepreneur with average potential and as much as 15 times more jobs than an entrepreneur with low potential,” Toua said.  

 “Clearly, PNG needs to create new jobs for the young people coming out of schools and universities.  Rather than big resource projects, the focus should be on encouraging the creation of startups to create new jobs.”  

He said startups tended to adopt innovation and use it to make their business more efficient.  

“They tend to develop new innovation, or they are the first to adopt innovation from elsewhere,” Toua said.  

“Look at the KGC startups and what they are adopting through use of technology and applications that have been used in other parts of the world but not in PNG.”